The Races

In the Olden Days (that blissful, innocent time which stretched from, say, Julius Caesar’s venture into the British Isles in 55 BCE all the way up until September 22, 2009, the date I arrived in the United Kingdom; also any historical moment in which the cultural practices in this country might have been different from the ones I associate with contemporary English society; also the date given to any historical event whose actual date I do not know. [See also: The Days of Yore]). In those days, the English used to entertain themselves by running a hare around a dirt track and letting loose a pack of greyhounds after it. First one across the finish line – or to catch the hare, I suppose – won.

I recently made my first venture down to the Oxford dog racing tracks. (“What? They actually still do that there?” would, dear reader, be an appropriate response). It was a night of upendings, of incongruities, of marked disparities between my expectations, on a number of levels, and the reality of what the subculture (or so I thought) surrounding dog racing is all about.

Nick, a college friend, invited a couple of us out for an evening of “beer, betting against the masses, the sweet rush of victory. Heck, what could be better?” I was struck though, when we arrived, first by the architecture of the place. It reminded one less of, well, a den of iniquity than a community center or a bowling alley. (For whatever reason I had intuitively associated dog racing with those more barbaric forms of Elizabethan entertainment that concentrated themselves on London’s South Bank – bear-baiting, prostitution, the theatre. Quite the contrary.) The stadium was large, enclosed and heated, full of people. Families, actually. Eating at the track’s fast-food style restaurant, the parents getting up at the appropriate moments to place bets for themselves and for their children.

Compared with the Olden Days, racing is now somewhat more ethical. There’s no hare, but a mechanical runner that whips around the track well out of reach of the dogs. Moreover, new laws in the UK place tight restrictions on trainers (“canicrossers”) not to abuse or neglect their dogs. Oxford’s track also supports a charity, The Greyhound Trust, which helps to find homes for retired dogs. On the betting side of things, the tracks are required to post advisories about the hazards of gambling and gambling addiction. That all does sound somewhat like a convenient rationalization; one could indeed circle for hours and hours around the specific ethics, or lack thereof, of dog racing. One could do this with particular vitriol after losing, as I did, 10 pounds on some “mangy *&%$ mutt that doesn’t know a race from a walk in the park.” (Said with irony).

Nick, our host, won about 60 pounds over the night. He later told us that he had designed a mathematical model for betting on horse races and was more or less relying on that to hedge against the other bidders.

An Oxford education’s good for something, I guess.